When did you decide to takeoff into the Hacker Community?

[Gunstar Green]

This is my first post and the first hacker forum I've registered to so I just wanted one basic post. For the question. Today is the day that I decided to takeoff into the Hacker Community.

[SomeoneE1se]

Welcome and be careful, now that you associate with hackers the FBI will be watching you!

[Gunstar Green]

Thanks for the warning. :shock:

[Rab]

I wouldnt say ive taken off into the hacker community at all, i've never hacked anyone. I just find I learn the odd thing or two from the show and forums.

[deleted]

I dont join hacker comunitys to "Hack", i like these comunitys. I really like this comunity, everyone will try to help you when you need help and everyone is friendly :D

[Gunstar Green]

Sorry I misinterpreted that. When I mean takeoff I'm leaning more towards what makes you interested about computers and or just hacking.

[Rab]

Computers, err... well...

Around 1999, all my friends had computers except me, and I was getting really pissed off that my mum couldnt affort one. She ended up meeting this guy who was a -insert important IT job- and we got a cheap one. It was really shite, 6 years old, but I used it all the time, but dialup was a pain. I put up with dialup for about a year and did little more than chat and build the odd site in front page lol

In 2000, we moved in with that same guy and he had a company connection so I got ISDN!!! omfg how leet was that! lol... so I got into online gaming, Diaspora, Continuum, Counter-Strike 1.5, and a bit more web dev. One day he came back from work with a report from his company, it turned out I was the company's largest bandwidth user BY FAR! rofl! he got spanked.

In 2002, I got royally pissed off with that old PC. So I gave my 9 year old PC to my mum, and decided to splash out with my savings. I bought an uber fantastical eMachines 570!! It had a stunning GeForce 4MX 440! By this point i've moved to doing all my work on PC, playing more games, building more sites. Despite what you might think, that machine was awesome, I only just replaced it this year.

So in 2004 I fucked off to uni, met a bunch of gamer friends who had far better machines. I'm currently in my final year of BSc Internet Computing. To be fair, it's pretty lame, but shit happens. I'm bored of this story now.

Point is... I was smarter than everyone else as a kid, so they all hated me, so the computer was a nice thing to keep me busy while I hid away from everything.

[CaveMan]

.....

lol too true

similar story, but replace dad with it guy, be we skipped dialup

[Laeknishendr]

I wouldn't label myself a "Hacker". I'm just curious about what can be done with different devices that weren't meant to be used that way. Like controlling your PC with a WII remote, playing Doom on an I-Pod, browsing the net with a C64... carrying around your microwave because you're using it as MP3-player :P

That's the stuff I like. But what's the definition of a "Hacker"...?

And as my Dad works with PCs as long as I can remember, I can't remember any time of my life I didn't have a computer somewhere around the house. I got introduced into MS-DOS and QBasic by my Dad, when I still was in kindergarten (the portable I had rather was an oversized brick than what you would call really "portable", and it only had a two colour screen: black and ORANGE). I did some stupid games in QBasic, but I lost interest in programming and rather played Space Invaders and Alley Cat.

The only time I can remember I got into programming a bit was, when Quake came out and the first mods for it appeared. I spent hours together with a classmate messing up Quake and then deathmatch over serial cable.

It's still the game I play most often, and I started to redo some of the hillarious "mods" we did back then (the original files all got lost).

Ah and the first time I had the possibility to go online, doing so made strange noises and took like forever to load a page

[VaKo]

Well apparently people think I'm a hacker so I let them continue.

[Guest MaxDamage]

...

[cooper]

I never actually singled out a site or something and said "I'm gonna hack these fucks", but when I use a site and discover something amiss... well, the fun part lies in seeing how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

One time we had a new coworker which turned out to be a really hot girl (already taken, of course). She'd said at some company party I didn't attend what her website was, so when they told me to look there for her picture I noticed a photo section that was password-protected. Turns out the URLs to the actual images were rather guessable given the page that lead up to the password protected part, and the convention used for other photos. So I whipped up a script to try all logical combinations and ended up with about 90% of the 'password protected' images. They were quite innocent I can assure you. Just pictures of her new house. So I packaged them up and mailed them to her with a note detailing how I, in the in the interest of data protection, made a backup of her site. It took me a while to get her to like me after that, but we're good friends now so... :D

[Paralys]

Wow, how I got my start into the hacker thing... that really depends on what definition you use.

I cant remember an exact year when i got into computers. Im going to take a shot in the dark and say 1998 or early 99, Somewhere around there anyway, My dad got a cheap comp for us (I'm going to go ahead and say, Fingerhut is not a good place to buy any computer ) Anyway, I was computer illiterate at the time. But at first, I was slightly amused with it but still internetless so to be honest I wasn't greatly impressed at first (played mostly solitaire at the time) and I guess I should note that this wasn't an impressive machine, ...32 MB of ram, with some odd little generic processor and other assorted crap parts)

But a month later or so I think, we got dial-up (w00t! tubes!) So I was young, thought it was cool, here was all this stuff that came out of no-where, All the stuff I could do and I kept finding more of it everyday. I guess (yeah, I was like 10 at the time, I'm only 17 now) So it wasn't anymore than a few little games and what not, but it was still cool that all this stuff came from seemingly nowhere. So a little bit later (another month or two) I found out about yahoo. Now I was actually talking to other people over the net... I was hooked from there, I kept learning more, started learning little things like "hey this is how you do this in paint" or "hey, msconfig in the run thingy will make the crap stop coming up with I turn it on." So I picked up on little things like that and without realizing it I started to know more and more from noobish stuff to stuff that may have not been so noobish.

Fast forward a bit later after the Fingerhut mystery pc finally died a slow miserable death. My mother buys a Compaq Persario 5000 and I continue my learning til this gives out, We buy a Dell then. Though since it was a family computer and I was so into learning about them I became slightly frustrated with my lack of time I got to use the computer. So I carried the mystery computer and the Compaq off to my room and started into the hardware end of it all. So I sat there, trying different ways of putting the parts together til it finally worked and I had my own box (though, still crap, it was at 160 MB ram now.)

So I continued using this and learning, finally finding out that I could create my webpages and learned HTML and what not then after I learned more after that and did a small internship with a local internet company in their web dev department earlier this year after school. But, not until the last year and a half or so have I actually even began to look at exploits like viruses/potentially black hat things. As for when I got into the community, I wrote a tiny report early at the beginning of the school year about hackers, the black hat side mainly (though I DID NOT use the hollywood version and wrote about the white hat side and what not) though it was mainly about how insecure some computers are even though it should be more important to keep their computers secure (ex. some schools) and just mainly a small sweep about hacking isn't just computers like uneducated people sometimes think (phreaking was mentioned)

So yeah, that pretty much overnight (EVEN THOUGH I TRIED TO EXPLAIN THAT HACKING WASN'T "evil blackhat/pwnz0r your bank account") made people think i was out to do things like that and I... got labeled for that and made people realize I was into computers that much, actually that report got me noticed because a teacher saw me making a webpage and suggested my internship. So theres my horribly long story. Hope it was worth something lolz

[SomeoneE1se]

Wow, how I got my start into the hacker thing... that really depends on what definition you use.

I cant remember an exact year when i got into computers. Im go

Oh my god, use paragraphs!

[Paralys]

Wow, how I got my start into the hacker thing... that really depends on what definition you use.

I cant remember an exact year when i got into computers. Im go

Oh my god, use paragraphs!

*apologizes* Heh... I posted that at oh... 8 a.m. after a couple nights without sleep and working a ton, I was about to head over. Sorry about the lack of paragraphs lol. *realizes how damn long it is* ....Didn't seem that long when I was that sleepy either...

Edit: lol There, fixed the paragraphs, hope its easier on the eyes now.

[SomeoneE1se]

Wow, how I got my start into the hacker thing... that really depends on what definition you use.

I cant remember an exact year when i got into computers. Im go

Oh my god, use paragraphs!

*apologizes* Heh... I posted that at oh... 8 a.m. after a couple nights without sleep and working a ton, I was about to head over. Sorry about the lack of paragraphs lol. *realizes how damn long it is* ....Didn't seem that long when I was that sleepy either...

Edit: lol There, fixed the paragraphs, hope its easier on the eyes now.

Thanks, now I might read it.... nope still not going to ;)

[Paralys]

Thanks, now I might read it.... nope still not going to ;)

:D Hey, I was bored ok? Plus it seemed like a good place to write, I know its absurdly long, but hey, if anyone else is bored then feel free to read it (try reading it during class, should drown out a little bit of the teacher.)

[SomeoneE1se]

Thanks, now I might read it.... nope still not going to ;)

:D Hey, I was bored ok? Plus it seemed like a good place to write, I know its absurdly long, but hey, if anyone else is bored then feel free to read it (try reading it during class, should drown out a little bit of the teacher.)

Nah man I was just kidding I read it the first time (it took forever I kept loosing my place because there was no paragraphs;) )

[theSmiler]

My computing career started with Windows 3.1 at my grandparents house. They had an old computer my uncle gave them, I played games and used mspaint to make pictures of things.

Then I went to Primary School (that's Australian for Elementary School). I ended up at a pretty nice place, they had a bunch of old macs for playing more games. Eventually they got put into this program called "Schools of the Future", and Apple/the Government (not sure which) donated a bunch of iMacs and assorted tech stuff. Behold, the internet! We got to use laptops and the iMacs almost every day and for every project, had our own space on a file server.

So when I went to highschool, there were less computers, and they used Windows. My parents got me an IBM Aptiva out of necessity, with Windows 98. I start to get into 3D games and use the internet for things other than school.

Around the dawn of Windows XP, I get some game and realise I can't run it. I try to figure out why, and find out I need to do something called "upgrading". I run into other problems too, such as pop-ups and overuse of the internet. I start to figure out how to move things around, and get interested in how things work.

I enter a programming class at school the next year. We used Excel functions and VB, but keep in mind that this was my first experience in programming anything with computers. Me and a friend accelerate to the top of our class, finish the work set for us in about half the time it's supposed to take, so the teacher gives us a book of extra programs to make in VB. It's all very easy, so I keep learning.

The more I figured out how to do things for gaming purposes, the more I liked manipulating the computer more than the actual gaming. I did a CCNA course through school, but unfortunately the instructor was an idiot so we didn't end up passing. However, because this was my first foray into networks, I learned a whole lot.

Around this time, I learned about hackers. I'd heard about viruses and how they were bad and evil and gross, but I never really considered the people who make them, or the people who protect against them. My friends and I become sort of deviant computer enthusiasts. I hesitate to use the word script kiddie, because although what we used was very, very BASIC, we made everything ourselves.

We did very basic things, like checking/changing keys in the registry and making pretend windows screens to fool the teacher into thinking we were doing what we were supposed to, batch files to open 100 instances of ping -t [whateverTheSchoolsServersIPwas], got past the schools internet nanny type security (we distributed the tool on the school network, but we passworded the program. In hindsight, I could have broken the password pretty easily, considering it was stored as plaintext inside the .exe), etc.

Eventually, my friend gets caught keylogging, with something he got off the net, after he brags about getting the admins password, and gives it out to people. I wasn't connected to it, but he gets banned from computers for a year. I learned some pretty valuable lessons early on: the cracker lifestyle is not at all glamorous, bragging is for losers, and don't get caught, ever.

So as I get older and my knowledge of computers gets bigger, I start to learn things. Methods of encryption, number systems, real programming, networking. I got into a TAFE course for Computer Systems and Engineering, and afterwards I'll be getting into the third year of Comp Sys at RMIT University. Recently, I've hit a brick wall: Windows isn't cutting it anymore. I've moved over to Ubuntu. Only been with it for a few days, but I'm learning a lot.

For the TLDR crowd:

Gamer -> genuine interest in computers -> wannabe hacker -> studying to be an IT Professional

[Deveant]

I got into a TAFE course for Computer Systems and Engineering, and afterwards I'll be getting into the third year of Comp Sys at RMIT University.

:| some one pretty much the same as me... in Aus, in Vic, going to Tafe, using it for the path ways into RMIT... im scared... what tafe u going to?

[theSmiler]

I got into a TAFE course for Computer Systems and Engineering, and afterwards I'll be getting into the third year of Comp Sys at RMIT University.

:| some one pretty much the same as me... in Aus, in Vic, going to Tafe, using it for the path ways into RMIT... im scared... what tafe u going to?

RMITs TAFE program. City campus.

[Guest ABC]

whenever it says i joined this forum

[theSmiler]

whenever it says i joined this forum

Nice boots.

[Guest ABC]

new rock raptor's .. £140 :P

yeah there 90% leather .. 5% rubber, 5% steel (rubber+ steel = sole)

[g-ram]

i think i got started hacking when i discovered inux and programming and stuff (it was like back in 7th 8th grade)